Field of the Invention
This invention relates to communications networks and to methods of controlling traffic therein.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,224,099, assigned to Stratacom, Inc., discloses a method of fair queuing and servicing call traffic in a telecommunication node which interfaces with a telecommunication system including a multiplicity of nodes. As each cell of bursty traffic is received it is placed in a respective subqueue according to a hopcount associated with the cell of bursty traffic, the hopcount being representative of the number of nodes traversed by the associated cell. Cells of traffic within the queue are serviced according to their associated hopcount, i.e. cells in the subqueue for the highest value of hopcount are serviced first. Cells that have spent too long in one subqueue are moved to the next higher subqueue, i.e. the queuing priority is increased, but the hopcount is unaffected. The hopcount associated with each cell of traffic is incremented as each cell of traffic is serviced. This prior art document is concerned with servicing incoming cells by giving priority to cells which have used more network resource.